


work from nine to five (and hell, you pay the price)

by forsyte



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Crack, Embarrassment, Gen, Humor, POV Second Person, Pre-Canon, The Author Regrets Nothing, make sure to check which tabs are visible before you ask someone to fix your computer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24026155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsyte/pseuds/forsyte
Summary: God, he can’t have known, because there'snoway he could know, unless he stalked you to your home, and you can’t imagine Elias “genuinely used the term nouveau riche once” Bouchard crouching in the bushes and dirt. It had to have been a coincidence. It was just your awful luck this coincidence happened to turn you into so much paralyzed meat.--The mortifying ordeal of being the resident I.T. expert.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas (implied)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 115





	work from nine to five (and hell, you pay the price)

**Author's Note:**

> i typed this up at 1am and i take responsibility for every word of it. heavy is the crown. title paraphrased from somebody's watching me by rockwell

You work at the Magnus Institute. Your job description says researcher, but what you really are is the unlucky schmuck who gets roped into fixing everyone’s computer problems, and hoo boy are there a lot of them. You wish people would try fiddling around with menus a little more before calling you to come bail them out of their messes, because if you have to grit your teeth and explain the difference between minimizing and closing a tab you’re going to snap and kill someone, but overall you get paid the same rate and most of the time you’re left alone enough that you can grab a few minutes here and there to kick back and watch some very illicit videos, so it’s not too bad. The wage’s nothing to sneeze at, the hours you work are solidly at human times of the day, and the breakroom near your desk has the nice teabags. It could be a lot worse. 

Generally, you mean. Today, though—today the head of the institute, Elias Bigwig himself, stops by your desk and says a friendly few words about how he could use a hand, says he seems to’ve made an error somewhere along the line during routine work, and inside you sigh but externally you offer him a polite-if-tired smile because you didn’t work customer service for nothing!! and you say of course, sir, and you’ll be along in a moment. 

“Mr. Bouchard will do just fine,” he tells you, smiling, and you almost open your big dumb mouth and say “I bet he will, sir,” but you’re not archive staff, you can’t get away with that, and friendliness aside Mr. Douchard seems the exact kind of person to stab someone during a staff meeting and wipe the blood off on their shirt. You say “noted, Mr. Bouchard,” and he smiles a little wider, and you finish what you’re doing and think idly about installing a deadman’s switch so that if he dumps your body somewhere you can let your sibling know you’re a dumbass from the grave.

On the walk to his office, you ask him what the problem is. He tells you he’s somehow managed to go and rotate the display on his monitor, and you breathe a sigh of relief because at least this is an easy fix and you aren’t going to be _too_ late to take a break before the lunch rush. 

Oh, you sweet summer child, you think to yourself, upon waking the computer, because the first fucking thing you see out of the corner of your eye, right next to a couple of Excel tabs labeled with dates, is a search tab for “sexy sailors.” You immediately regret looking. Possibly you regret having eyes. You are so fucking uncomfortable right now. You don’t want to think about this, you— you _don’t_ want to think about this. Three months ago during your performance review you walked in and he was staring off into the distance rubbing his thumb absentmindedly over a clear paperweight with a resin anchor embedded into it and the air smelled faintly of sea salt and you _don’t_ want to think about this—

With a sense of resignation you realize you are going to be thinking about this for the rest of your life. 

He is watching you over your shoulder. Suppressing a shudder of discomfort, you reorient the screen correctly. It takes you very little time. You suspect the whole sordid ordeal would take much less time in the future, given your desk is on the other side of the building, if you could explain what happened to him, but he does not ask, and you are not about to volunteer, or indeed say anything at all other than the bare minimum, because you do not trust your mouth right now. 

“Thank you for your assistance,” he says, when you straighten up, and he steps back very slightly to allow you to escape. “I’ll be sure to ask again if something goes wrong,” and he’s smiling at you, and the crinkles at the corner of his eyes invite you to share in the joke, and his pale pale grey-green irises promise an absolute world of passive-aggressiveness if you don’t, so you laugh awkwardly, and you say—

(Oh god, what do you even _say_ in this situation?)

lacking sensible guidance from your brain, which is still reeling, your mouth fires off a casual “Aye aye, captain,” and you turn to leave. Not a second passes before you realize what you did. Your back is, mercifully, to him, which means he does not see the way your entire face goes slack in a mask of utter mortification. You can feel every ounce of blood in your body straining to escape your face. You think your nose might start bleeding on the spot.

Mr. Bouchard hasn’t said anything, and you haven’t been frozen for that long, and so when you reach for the handle of his office door you pray desperately that both of you will allow this to pass into the annals of time unmarked.

The stars are not in your favor today.

Because they are not in your favor today, he replies, and what he says, _far_ too casually, is, “You watch your mouth, sailor,” in the _exact_ same cadence as the lead in your favorite video to watch while _unwinding,_ except he replaces “young man” with “sailor.” Literally identically. 

Somehow your legs work, and when you regain conscious thought you are closing the door behind you. You are outside his office. You are outside the office of the Head of the Magnus Institute, where you work, and you have just accidentally referenced the fact that you caught him looking up material best left for after-work hours, and somehow he has responded in kind, despite the fact that he _definitely_ doesn’t know how incognito windows work let alone VPNs and you’re pretty sure you haven’t watched that video at your desk anyway. That’s one of the ones you leave for home. 

Gods above and hells below. 

This morning you got up and you made terrible caffeinated tea to wash down your prescription stimulants with and you commuted to your workplace and you walked in and you made more terrible tea and you sat down and you began working on cross-referencing works which cite a book you’re not sure exists, and, you know, just, you thought this was going to be a normal day? Absolutely not. Your entire world has been irrevocably shattered. You have no idea how he knew. God, he can’t have known, because there is _no_ way he could know, unless he stalked you to your home, and you can’t imagine Elias “genuinely used the term nouveau riche once” Bouchard crouching in the bushes and dirt. It had to have been a coincidence. It was just your awful luck this coincidence happened to turn you into so much paralyzed meat. 

You begin walking. You’re not sure where you’re headed except when you reach the staircase you turn left, and this is good, you’ve still beaten the lunch rush and you can have a few quiet moments outside in the small courtyard alone while you contemplate quitting your job and possibly changing your name and moving to Bolivia. The rhythm of your descent is nice and soothing and focusing on not tripping over the too-narrow steps and snapping your neck on the way down helps you push recent events out of your mind. You reach the side door and open it with a sigh of relief, turning the corner to step out into the chilly open space and then lean against a wall. 

Except today’s not your day, by any metric, because the courtyard’s already haunted, and this time by some asshole in a leather trench coat, facing away from you—

Wait. Wheels in your head start turning. They’ve got black hair down a bit past their shoulders and the coat looks a bit ragged and they’re warming their hands over what looks like a wastebasket with smoke billowing out—holy hell, is that a book, are they burning a _book_ —and, yeah, that’s the resident urban legend. You think his name is Jared, or maybe Gary? Whichever it is, he’s the goth mystery dude who shows up sometimes and lurks around the archives and you’re fairly certain the one time he walked past you he was chatting animatedly about killing ghosts or something while helping Gertrude with her groceries, so all of you in the upper wing have something of an unofficial rumor mill going about him and everyone appreciates a good Goth Encounter Story. It makes for great water cooler conversation and all that and _any_ other day you would be excited.

Right now, though, you’d really appreciate it if he chose literally anywhere else to stare moodily off into the distance and burn his old journals, because you’re busy rethinking every life choice you’ve ever made and honestly you really don’t want company for this. Before you say anything, though, the door shuts, and the noise it makes is like if someone heard a cannon and thought “I can barely hear that, which is a design flaw.” The noise it makes is like a heavy metal band composed of elephants. The noise it makes is comparable to the roar heard in the first seconds of the universe, when all was an explosion of chaos.

It’s loud is what you mean. And so he whips around to face you, like a startled cat.  
Under the trenchcoat he is wearing: 

knee-length boots, liberally studded with decorative buckles;

booty shorts;

and a fishnet shirt. 

You look at him, and he looks at you, and with no particular fanfare besides a faint nod, as if confirming to the universe that yep, you’ve seen it, yes, you realize this is real and happening to you, personally, right now,

you crumple to the ground and pass out. 

You don’t know how long you’re out. When you wake up it is to the urge to cough harshly. You sit bolt upright, dislodging a small, damp cotton pad, which smells of—ammonia?

Are those _smelling salts?_

What on _earth?_

There is no one else around, save for the swish of a sensible cardigan disappearing behind a closing door on the far side of the courtyard. Much too far to be the source of the fumes in your lungs, even if they threw the wad of soaked cotton from a distance, unless the cardigan belongs to a world class marksman. 

You hate your job. 

**Author's Note:**

> this whole thing started as me making an extended joke out loud along the lines of "wouldn't it be fucked up if you ran into the resident leather coat goth and he turned around and under the coat he was just wearing booty shorts and a mesh shirt," and during the course of the conversation that followed it became....... this.  
> yell at me in the comments section or in my [askbox](https://morguecrow.tumblr.com/ask).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] work from nine to five (and hell, you pay the price)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28535799) by [carboncopies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carboncopies/pseuds/carboncopies)




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